| mean | sd | note_count |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5004421 | 0.0973453 | 250163 |
Music is a mystery. Our ears love it and are quick to process it, but our brains struggle to understand it. For this reason, I am interested in looking at it from a different point of view. Why?
Aligned Scores and Performances (ASAP) dataset repository. Fork of the ASAP dataset repository whose authors are: Foscarin, Francesco and McLeod, Andrew and Rigaux, Philippe and Jacquemard, Florent and Sakai, Masahiko
Follows are the composers and their work represented in the catalog.
| Composers | Performances | Scores |
|---|---|---|
| Bach | 169 | 59 |
| Balakirev | 10 | 1 |
| Beethoven | 271 | 57 |
| Brahms | 1 | 1 |
| Chopin | 289 | 34 |
| Debussy | 3 | 2 |
| Glinka | 2 | 1 |
| Haydn | 44 | 11 |
| Liszt | 121 | 16 |
| Mozart | 16 | 6 |
| Prokofiev | 8 | 1 |
| Rachmaninoff | 8 | 4 |
| Ravel | 22 | 4 |
| Schubert | 62 | 13 |
| Schumann | 28 | 10 |
| Scriabin | 13 | 2 |
| Total | 1067 | 222 |
:::
Performances and scores are very closely related, but they are not the same. The score is the composition as written by the composer. The performance is the composition as played by the performer. Classical music is a very structured genre, but the performance of it is very expressive. It’s very difficult to reproduce it in it’s entirety with metadata such as dynamics. Where the tempo, key-signature and time-signature are meaningful in the score, they are meaningless in the performances in this repository. According to their metadata (in the MIDI files) they all look as if the were written in 4/4, the key of C and at 120/117 BPM. The score is the blueprint, the performance is the building.
| Column | Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
id |
ID that identifies this composition | string |
composer |
Composer’s last name | string |
year_born |
Composer’s birth year (Wikipedia) | integer |
year_died |
Composer’s death year (Wikipedia) | integer |
year_midlife |
Composer’s halfway point (Wikipedia) | integer |
title |
Composition’s title | string |
performer |
The performer. Extracted from midi_performance |
string |
midi_score |
The composition’s MIDI score file (relative path) | string |
midi_performance |
The composition’s MIDI performance file (relative path) | string |
csv_score |
The score’s CSV (relative path) | string |
csv_performance |
The performance’s CSV (relative path) | string |
| Column | Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
id |
composition ID | integer |
composer |
The composer of the piece | string |
year_born |
The composer’s birth year (Wikipedia) | integer |
year_died |
The composer’s death year (Wikipedia) | integer |
year_written |
This as an approximation that is accurate to half the composer’s lifetime. | integer |
title |
The composition’s title | string |
performer |
The performer. Extracted from midi_performance. NA for scores |
string|NA |
type |
The type of data. Music is all note |
string |
time_offset |
The number of seconds from the beginning | float |
time_duration |
The duration in seconods | float |
tick_offset |
The number of MIDI ticks from the beginning | integer |
tick_duration |
The duration in MIDI ticks | integer |
note_midi |
The MIDI value of the note | integer |
note_normal |
The MIDI value normalized, [0, 1] | integer |
velocity |
The velocity of the note, [0, 1] | integer |
pretty |
The named representation of the note. Matches key-signature’s spelling | string |
canonical |
The canonical representation of the note. We always use the flat equivalent | string |
density |
How dense notes are in the vicinity of this note. | float |
interval |
The interval between this note and the following note | string |
tempo |
The tempo of the current point in the piece | integer |
key_signature |
The key signature at this point in the piece | string |
time_signature |
The time signature at this point in the piece | string |
ticks_per_quarter |
The number of ticks in a quarter note | integer |
MIDI = Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
| Type | Performer | Media |
|---|---|---|
| Audio | Elaine Lee | |
| MIDI Performance | Elaine Lee | |
| MIDI Score | NA |
The Well-Tempered Clavier I No. 3 in C-sharp major (BWV 848) by J.S. Bach
I believe it may have. I shall use an F-test to determine if there is a significant difference in note variance between the two portions of the dataset: 1685 - 1799 and 1799 - 1953.
Independent variable: time.
Dependent variable: note variance.
1685 - 1799
| mean | sd | note_count |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5004421 | 0.0973453 | 250163 |
1799 - 1953
| mean | SD | note_count |
|---|---|---|
| 0.504 | 0.112 | 431444 |
Yes, sufficiently enough for us to proceed.
Yes, each note is independent of the other notes.
We calculated our SD for both portions of our dataset and found that they are close, with a difference of ~0.01, which is 1% of our range. This is acceptable.
\(H_0\): There is no significant difference in note variance over time.
\(H_1\): There is a significant difference in note variance over time.
F test to compare two variances
data: tbl_music_old$note_normal and tbl_music_new$note_normal
F = 0.75021, num df = 250162, denom df = 431443, p-value < 2.2e-16
alternative hypothesis: true ratio of variances is not equal to 1
95 percent confidence interval:
0.7460728 0.7543880
sample estimates:
ratio of variances
0.750213
The p-value is crazy small which gives me reason to believe that I can reject the null hypothesis. There is a significant difference in note variance between the two portions of the dataset.
It is important in the same way that history is important. It informs us of who we are and where we might be going. Interestingly, I would guess that the variance in note values has decreased in the past ~70 years. But this does not make us bad people. Variance in music does not correlate to quality. Egads, I wouldn’t want to touch that experiment with a ten-foot pole.
The Well-Tempered Clavier I No. 3 in C-sharp major
It is the most impossible key in the whole of the Wohltemperirte Clavier: C-sharp major. No fewer than seven sharps adorn the beginning of each staff. Furthermore, it is an unnecessarily complicated key, as instead of seven sharps you could use five flats to write exactly the same pitch – as D-flat major. In 1728, the music theorist Johann David Heinichen therefore classified C-sharp major as one of the ‘superfluous keys’. Here, Bach is deliberately toying with the mind of the keyboard player, as the instinctive correspondence between the black noteheads on the paper and the fingers on the keys no longer works.